Brewing hoppy beers for longevity

[Cain Harland]

Ive had a couple of IPAs and PAs lately that have been great 2 - 5 weeks in the bottle and then lost both their hoppyness and sweetness pretty fast after that. My Yakima monster clone was probably even quicker, it was totally drinkable and really resiney after about 1 week, then peachy (Simcoe?) and delicious for about a week then orangy (Amarillo?) now a bit bland not terrible but not great either. The 1 week old which should have been shit was better than the 6 week old which should have been great.

Beer keeping for such a short time would be totally unacceptable for a commercial craft brewer and I know there are plenty of hoppy beers out there that last well for months, even unfiltered and bottle conditioned ones eg heady topper (not filtered or pasteurized) or sierra nevada. pale ale (bottle conditioned). So I thought I would ask does any one have tips for designing a hoppy beer that stays hoppy for a long time in the bottle. Also same question about the sweetness my beers seem to get very dry and over carbonated over time.

Obviously filtering, pasteurizing, force carbing and cold storage would help with these issues but there has to be something else.

[Peter Smith]

Kegging    it will keg well and you can add hops in a bag to the keg later if it lasts that long.....

I think at 20C beer ages 10 times faster then at 2C    so 6weeks at 20C is like 60weeks at 2C   cant say I have kept a keg for a year, beer is made for drinking, how long does a 50L keg last at a craft bar, its been at low temps ALL ITS LIFE, and is probably smashed in 48 hours at a busy pub, maybe less.

Or brew english bitters / russian imperial stouts / belgium strongs  which need months in a bottle to mellow anyway...

Re overcarb, after 3 weeks primary rack to secondary for a 2 weeks , the added oxygen in the racking will finish the ferment..... or/and use oxygen at start of ferment  and temp profiles for the ferment push up 5-8C at end of ferment to finish, still some yeast is lazy, all this is avoided if you keg, then bottle from keg and store cold.

How many beers have you purchased commercial that bottle carb warm?

[Cain Harland]

Is a pub keg rally kept cold all its life? I was under the impression they were kept wherever until they were due to be tapped then moved to the limited space in the keg fridge.

I was more thinking about bottled beer, a bottle of sierra nevada pale ale for example. I've never actually drunk one but it has a good rep for being a hoppy beer. Its produced in vast quantities and bottle conditioned, trucked and shipped all over the place, left in the store room out the back of the bottle store or super market at ambient temp and retains its hoppyness.

Even with something not bottle conditioned say a bottle of Yakima monster or Panhead super charger you have to assume most of the time when you buy it its more than a month old and spent most of that time in transit of storage at ambient temperature and still has all its hoppy goodness.

That being said about commercial craft beer you have a very good point about temperature and maybe the easiest thing to do is find an old fridge or freezer I can stack crates in, I only have a little beer fridge at the moment. Kegging would be great but that's pretty pricey so probably a while off. In the mean time longer primary and cold crash might help.

[Crusader-Rob]

No, it won't be but thats where the CO2 protection comes in.

[Cain Harland]

In terms of process I don't have a secondary fermenter just 1 converted 50L keg and airate rather than oxygenate, that is I have a tube with lots of little Venturi holes in it that I use when transferring from kettle to fermenter, it sucks in a lot of air and mixes it with the wort. I have been bottle priming and filling straight out of the fermenter.

[Kevin Sharp]

By "bottle carb" do you mean bottle condition? If so that would pretty much all commercial bottle conditioned beer. It's usually fermented in the bottle at about 21 degC for about a week. The Belgians in particular have incubators specifically for this. This is another reason why bottle conditioning isn't compatible with hop forward beer. Once the beer is carbed then I'd agree with you - keep it as cold as possible.

The principle is that almost all chemical, physical and metabolic processes speed up as temperature increases. Up to the point where the beer is carbed you want things to progress swiftly. After that with a hop forward beer any further chemical, physical or metabolic reaction should be minimised.

[Crusader-Rob]

Peter is partially right. kegging/ and cold conditioning play a huge part in the slowing of the aging process.

but theres another element to it, and thats CO2. this is another reason that kegging is an advantage over bottling, the ability to purge co2 in the head space to prevent oxidation of the hops.

see these articles here:

http://www.bear-flavored.com/2014/09/how-i-dry-hop-my-ipas-with-no-...
http://www.metabrewing.com/2014/08/avoiding-oxygen-when-kegging-co2...

when you rack from fermenter to bottling tank, theres risk of oxtgen pickup, which means the hops won't last quite as long.

[Sam DT]

I have been having the same loss of flavour and sweetness after a month followed by over carb at 2-3 months.

I've figured it's an infection and have turfed all my saved yeasts and got a couple of kegs off TM to turn into fermenters so I can boil sanitise them. 

I'm also going to have a go at combined thermal/chemical sterilisation of my plastic fermenters and always storing them full of full strength percarb solution to see if I can knock it off that way too. I'm also removing my bottling bucket from my process by going back to carb drops and have replace all my tubing - figure bulk priming is just another opportunity for infection and oxygen pick-up in my case.

All that said they do seem to hold flavour if I store them chilled but I can't delineate between slowed ageing and the infection being slowed by the lower temps although I assume the over-carbonation wouldn't occur if it was just standard ageing.

Hot side oxygen pickup could be another factor whether during the boil or possibly even mash. Boiling removes free oxygen from the solution but oxygen that adsorbs into the wort while it's hot get's re released and oxidises flavours over time. Again this probably wouldn't cause over carbonation (unless the availability of oxygen kicked the yeast back into growth phase).

[Cain Harland]

I really don't think its an infection there's no off flavors or weird textures or any thing. The over carbing/dry beer I think is just the yeast continuing to work beyond when I would like them to stop. The active yeast probably also contribute to the degradation of the hops, there are probably other factors at play here too. I'm going to try a longer primary fermentation (3 instead of 2 weeks) and cold crash (>week rather than a couple of days) and maybe leave dry hop till cold crash. It wont help with the sweetness issue but may with the over carbing and the effect yeast activity has on the hops.

[Peter Smith]

what yeast is seeing this issue??   I had a few us05 disasters, less since I moved to mainly 1272/007

[Sam DT]

Could well be,

I'm also not seeing any weird flavours although the loss of sweetness and flavour certainly detract from the drink-ability.

I de-carbed one and had got out to 84% attenuation with a WLP001 (supposed to max out at 80%).

Extended primary sounds like a plan  (I've taken to doing a week cold crash as standard), pushing up mash temps by a degree or two might also be a goer. I'd always thought Beer Smith slightly over estimated attenuation / recommended slightly high mash temps compared to recipes I'd read but maybe it was right all along...

Might have to bring forward that cold storage fridge investment...

I've had the same issue across 007 and 001 which made me think infection - I've used WY2007 as well for lagers but they've been chilling in my fermentation fridge over Christmas so no issues (and to be honest a bit more drying out would do them some good), they both finished two points lower than expected tho.

Re-use could be an issue too, got out to around gen 4 with the 001 but only gen 2 on the 007 - I'm splitting a 4L starter into 8 samples to keep rather than harvesting from an actual brew this time around.

[Cain Harland]

yeah us-05

[Kevin Sharp]

IMHO there are two things which damage the hoppyness of beer over time; yeast and oxygen.

Yeast. The hop aromatics will tend to bind with the yeast which effectively neutralises the hoppyness. For this reason it's important that the beer has dropped clear and is taken off the trub before dry hopping. It also means that bottle conditioning very hoppy beers is not ideal. The commercial beers you mention can get the yeast count very low even without filtering.  Sierra Nevada then add a tiny controlled measure of yeast - the bare minimum required for bottle conditioning.

Oxygen. Everyone knows that oxygenation damages beer and reduces it's shelf life, but the effects on hop aromatics are particularly dramatic. The hop character will be destroyed well before there's any hint of cardboard or sherry. Most US IPA brewers go to a lot of trouble to eliminate oxygen from their process e.g.  double evac bottling.

There are lots of options for reducing yeast and oxygen in your beer. What you choose is probably dependent on what equipment you have and what you're prepared to buy. Personally I favour PolyClar to reduce the yeast count (and polyphenols),  C02 evac  the secondary fermentor and force carb the beer in a keg.

It's worth noting though that even with all their process advantages many commercial hop forward beers don't keep well. If I remember correctly, Dogfish Head recommend their hoppy beers are drunk within 6 weeks of bottling and can be considered expired after 3 months.

I'm not sure what causes excessive drying of beers over time. I do know of commercial brewers that expect their beers to dry over time, and they generally consider this desirable. If you want to avoid it you could pasteurise your bottled beers in a dishwasher. I've done this successfully with elderflower cordial, but not tried with beer. In either case it's a good idea to put the bottles in a cotton bag (or similar) to contain any broken glass. With very heavy beers (such as Imperial Russian Stout) I've held them in secondary for several months and then primed with champagne yeast and dextrose. The champagne yeast has a very high alcohol tolerance but will only digest simple sugars. This means it consumes all the dextrose but none of the complex sugars that you want to retain. I've kept IRS primed in this way for a year without it showing any signs of drying.